Tag: media corruption

I’m badly out of step with my media brethren, since I find the fate of Wikileaks and its besieged founder, Julian Assange, a truly compelling story. Other media don’t agree. The pressure on Assange, who has taken sanctuary in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, is to them fringe stuff, a quirky faceoff involving a spectral, white-haired weirdo most journalists disdain, who spilled secrets that annoyed officialdom and which U.S. media mostly ignored anyway.

True, the story’s got sex, since Sweden wants Assange extradited to answer complaints of bedroom wrongdoing in Stockholm. But even sex can’t give it the boost it needs, and Wikileaks gets nowhere near the attention lavished, for instance, on the imbecilic U.S. Senate candidate from Missouri who believes women have an inbuilt capacity to keep from being impregnated by rapists.

I think the real Wikileaks story is a very big deal and has been preposterously underplayed and under-reported by the U.S. media. Wikileaks, the global anti-secrecy network Assange founded, exploded into the headlines worldwide in 2010. It had been aggressively posting documents from foreign governments and private entities—exposing corruption in Kenya, tax avoidance by a British bank, toxic waste in West Africa, internal Scientology documents.

But Wikileaks became world famous in April 2010 when its leaks involved the United States. First was the release of gunsight video showing a U.S. helicopter massacring people on a Baghdad street, among them civilians, Reuters journalists and a child. That was followed by war logs first from Iraq, then from Afghanistan, thousands of U.S. military documents, and by a third trove—U.S. diplomatic cables, more than 250,000, covering some 100 countries, published by a makeshift cooperative of four leading news organizations.

As a reporter, I was taught that people you interview give up control of their words the moment they’re spoken. This was the trapdoor model: The lid slammed shut, and even if moments later the source had speaker’s remorse, the words belonged to me. I exaggerate, but not much.

As an academic now I’m more often a source than a reporter, and I’m grateful when reporters read back what they’re going to use from our interviews. Sometimes they misheard me. And sometimes my comments—once stripped of tone and inflection—don’t really say what I was trying to say, so I suggest changes. The objective, it would seem, isn’t to record stenographically whatever I said, but to convey what I meant.

That’s a slippery proposition, but usually the point of an interview is to learn somebody’s views, not to catch them sounding stupid. Because few of us speak in well-turned prose and we often grope and fumble, the idea of a reporter’s treating an interview as a collaboration toward a common goal—clarity—isn’t a terrible thing.

So to today’s media mini-scandal, exposed recently in a disturbing New York Times article about a growing insistence among top politicos on having the last word over what’s reported from their interviews. “Now, with a millisecond Twitter news cycle and an unforgiving, gaffe-obsessed media culture, politicians and their advisers are routinely demanding that reporters allow them final editing power over any published quotations,” reporter Jeremy Peters wrote.

Peters mentioned officials who red-pencil obscenities, squeeze back long-winded comments, and insist on deletions, not because they were misquoted but because the remarks are deemed ill-timed or tactically unwise. “Organizations like Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Reuters and The New York Times have all consented to interviews under such terms,” Peters wrote.